I am delighted to end this year’s series of Three Questions and An Answer with a whole bunch of intelligent answers to my questions from Emily Van Duyne.

Emily is an associate professor at Stockton University and a 2022 Fulbright Scholar. Her work has appeared in Literary Hub, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. Her work on Sylvia Plath, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation , was a New Yorker Best Book of 1924 and has been described as “a nuanced, intelligent, and passionate exploration of the life and work of one of the most misunderstood writers of the twentieth century.” She lives in New Jersey with her husband and children, and is at work on a book about the history of campus sexual assault in the United States.

Take it away, Emily!

You describe your examination, what you call your interrogation, of Plath’s life and work as being driven by “a love informed by a rigorous demand.”  What do you mean by that?



Upon Plath’s posthumous fame, her fans and scholars were almost immediately derided as “martyring” her when they expressed love for her work. This line of argument was most famously and publicly taken up by Ted Hughes, Plath’s widower and the executor of her estate, and the critic Al Alvarez, who was one of Plath’s lovers near the end of her life and wrote frequent criticism of her work, after her death. Both of these men, ironically, often used the language of martyrdom or religious iconography to characterize Plath and her late poetry. For example, Alvarez, writing about his last encounter with Plath in December 1962, described her as “a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult.” Hughes once wrote that if Robert Lowell was “a fine doctor, Sylvia is a miracle healer.” And yet they castigated women fans of Plath (especially young women fans of Plath) as being in a cult surrounding her. So I felt it was crucial to name my overt admiration of Plath’s life and writing as love, which is distinct from obsession or martyrdom, and to write about how young women’s admiration or love of other young women or their work is often reduced or pathologized.

At the same time, there is a very real tendency in Plath studies to whitewash her life and work, because Plath is usually studied by white women who come from similar backgrounds as her (white, genteel, neoliberal, highly educated). This was not the case with me, as I am from a working-class background, but also, I root my interest in Plath (and my interests more generally) in more radical feminist traditions, and understand anti-racism to be at its heart. When I was approaching this material, I was thinking a lot about James Baldwin, who said that he loved America so much that he had to criticize it as fiercely as he did, because he demanded better of and for America. On an (obviously) much smaller scale, this is how I feel about Plath. Her work has been more vital to my imaginative life than any other writer, and yet I cannot claim to be an intersectional feminist critic if I simply gloss over Plath’s racism and antisemitism. So I interrogate those parts of Plath’s work and biography as strenuously as I do the rest of it, in the hope that this yields a rounder Plath, but also a rounder field of study about Plath, one that welcomes people who are not only white, middle-class women with a particular background and bent. I see this as an act of love for Plath, and those who love her. A continuous one.

Writing about a historical figure like Sylvia Plath requires living with her over a period of years.  What was it like to have her as a constant companion?


She changes with me! Which is to say, there was a time when I feared her, as a young woman. I worried that I might die in the way she did, because that was part of the false mythology about her that had been sold to me by American literary culture. But this has also allowed me to understand a great deal about how she has been mythologized. Because the patriarchy is, as they say, one hell of a drug if it can convince smart, studious, curious young women, women like I was, and women who still populate my classrooms, that it was poetry that killed Sylvia Plath, and not isolation and abuse and depression. Or that I should fear Plath’s poetry as a possible catalyst for my own depression, rather than, say, a society structured to support the abuse and isolation of women and children by violent men. Or institutions which abandon those same women when they need help the most, which certainly abandoned Plath and her children when they did. In this way, Plath has been my best teacher about how we treat women, in life and in death—especially women with power and voice, which Plath had in spades.

I survived, though, and that allowed me to forgive myself in ways I wish Plath could have done. She was so demanding and exacting of herself, and whatever this quality did or did not contribute to her depression and death, I can’t imagine that it helped her day-to-day life. 

Having Plath in my life in all the ways she is there, large and small, has been an extraordinary blessing. She has brought me into contact with some of the smartest, funniest, most radical people I know, who have become lifelong, sustaining friends in a difficult world. She has taken me all over America and Europe to learn about her life, which has also allowed me to learn about the lives of women all over America and Europe. She has taught me how to overcome crushing circumstances and despair. And although I can confidently say, now, that I possess a degree of expertise about her life and poetry, she is still not quite in full view, for me. She remains just out of reach, in the corner of my eye, beckoning me to come back and look again. I always do.

Most of my readers will recognize the name Sylvia Path.  Are there particularly challenges in writing about women who people think they know something about?

Yes. Plath studies is a crowded field, and I was sure that there would be a flurry of reviews asking, Why do we need another book about Sylvia Plath? There were fewer than I thought, in the end, but I imagine that was because I went so far left of what most books on Plath cover, by focusing on intimate partner violence. This worked in my favor, but there were also outraged readers, mostly Hughes friends and fans and scholars, who could not abide the fact that I was willing to put these things in print, with receipts, rather than toeing the party line that Hughes and his associates put forward so many years ago—that he was the long-suffering victim of her madness who tried to “cure” her, poor helpless case that she was. 

It’s always my intention to complicate the pat images we have of Plath as a literary sad girl, a 1950s golden girl. But people also love that simplicity, and resist learning a new “version” of things they cling to, comfortably. I knew that this would act against the book, potentially, because people might read it and not quite know what to do with it. And that did happen, initially, in maybe the two months following publication. But I have a longer view on my work, especially since I write about a woman who didn’t become famous until after her death and who is constantly reconsidered. Reviews of the book just keep popping up, months later, in which people reconsider Plath or my views on Plath, and that brings me great happiness and reminds me to keep at my work.

We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past.  What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?

The gatekeeping! So many people who knew Plath are either still living or recently dead, and, per your last question, cling strongly to ideas about who she was that are either outmoded or, we know now, having far more access to Plath’s primary sources, simply false. And Hughes embargoed a lot of work by Plath, or by him, or related to Assia Wevill (his lover after Plath, who also killed herself in 1969). Even though much of that is now technically open to the public, Hughes’s archives are restricted from photography, so when you visit, you have to hand transcribe everything you want to see. This puts intense limitations on how much you can take away from a given archive, which limits the scope of our work. That’s a kind of institutional gatekeeping that he keeps in place, almost thirty years after his death. And Plath is hardly alone, in this regard. I have many colleagues working on women like Dorothy Parker and Daphne du Maurier who encounter different versions of these same problems. And this is to say nothing of the wholesale erasure Hughes undertook of much of Plath’s work.

How did your personal experience of partner violence inform your treatment of Sylvia Plath’s life?

Surviving intimate partner violence with my older son’s father (who is now long-estranged from both of us), and then having some distance from that relationship, gave me a lens into what Plath survived in her marriage. I felt this gave me an added epistemological layer in my approach to her. I have two degrees in the fine arts, both of which had an emphasis on women and gender studies, so questions about gendered violence and power were already things I had academic background and training in, in addition to poetry and biography. But part of that training was also the idea that if I viewed Plath through the lens of my own life, I would be committing the unpardonable academic sin of abandoning “objectivity.” Of course, this is wielded like a cudgel against oppressed peoples attempting to recognize oppression and name it, via their own experience. No one, for instance, would disparage a person who experienced brain cancer, who sees another person having their same symptoms and says, Hey, I’ve been through this, I recognize what you are going through and think you should see a doctor. That person would be lauded for speaking out. But when women who have survived gender-based violence say, I’ve lived through that so I can recognize it, they are often told they are “too close” to the situation and therefore cannot see the forest for the trees. This is misogynistic nonsense, just another entry in the shallow playbook to keep women from naming their realities. For my money, it allowed me to see (and name, and document) the individual trees in Plath’s vast forest, sometimes for the first time.

Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, and the way it has been mythologized, play an important role in your work.  Are there special challenges in writing about a woman whose biography is closely tied to that of a famous man?

I think what I wrote above, about the gatekeeping Hughes did during his lifetime and then made sure continued to exist, legally, after his death, has been the greatest challenge. But also, how hard it is to extricate Plath from Hughes, socially, creatively, legally. There are whole fields of Hughes studies which have nothing to do with Plath—for instance, the Ted Hughes Society recently put out a call for papers for a forthcoming conference, with more than 25 possible topics. Plath’s name appeared one time in that document. The same would not be true—has not been true—for Plath studies, or conferences about the same. 

At the same time, I welcome the collaboration and wish people who study Hughes were, on the whole, a bit… warmer toward those of us who study Plath. Or anyway, some of us. I don’t shy away from the harder or uglier parts of Plath because that is literally my job, to stare them down and deal with them. I can’t understand why many Hughes scholars can’t do the same, and see it as yet another irony—is it not an act of martyrdom, to return us to my response to your first question, to refuse to acknowledge who Hughes was and what he did? Yes, he was a large-hearted Yorkshireman to the male poets who sought out his attention. He also beat and abused his wife. These things can co-exist. 

Finally, though, I have to say that Hughes and Plath’s poetic relationship is fascinating. They drafted their work on the back pages of one another. It’s an incredible thing to see, in the archives. So, again—if those of us working on them could work together more effectively, we might discover some incredible things. And also, Plath scholars often end up as de facto Hughes scholars, because we have to be, while Hughes scholars… don’t do the same.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Plath while doing research for your work?  


This might sound like a cliché, but I would say that I was surprised and moved by the depth of her suffering as a result of her abusive marriage. I say this because, even though I went into this with the idea that Plath’s experience of intimate partner violence was likely worse than had been previously reported, what I found proved to be a great deal worse than even I thought. Not merely in that, there was considerably more, and more extreme, forms of physical and sexual violence happening to her. But also in that those forms of violence are now known to increase depression and suicidality in victims of IPV with a prior history of one or the other. And so I think Plath, by the end of her life, was really in agony, because not only was she isolated and physically ill and depressed. But the person she had held up to everyone she trusted and loved as a paragon of strength had proved himself to be a worthless liar, and serial cheater, who was stealing money from her. And so, facing that—facing not only that reality, but also the fact of how wrong she had been, how publicly wrong—was agonizing and humiliating. She has a poem called “Mystic” from the last month of her life, in which she wrote, “Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?” Plath believed in the inherent mysticism of romantic love, of sex—she was heavily influenced by D.H. Lawrence in that way—and Hughes was the embodiment of that, for her. She gave him everything. And now it turned out to be a false idol. I think that was horrific for her. That pain has been mocked and minimized, but I saw it (and felt it, by proxy, but also in my own romantic history) for what it was. It moved me tremendously. It made me want to honor that pain, put its truth and its roots on the page.

Also, she almost made it. She was so close. If she could have held on until the spring, I think she would have lived a long life.

Plath is seldom discussed in terms of her place as a contemporary American writer of the mid-twentieth century.  Why has she been left out of the canon?  Is her erasure part of a larger pattern of leaving women poets and novelists out of the modern canon or is it specific to the details of her life?

I think about this a lot, and I often say that Plath is the red-headed stepchild of the academy, or the canon. On the one hand, she continues to be more popular than most poets, alive or dead, and to sell much better than both. On the other hand, she gets pigeonholed as a “young woman’s writer,” which somehow makes her less than, or bad, which is in and of itself hugely misogynistic. What’s wrong with young women liking your work? I have never read as widely or voraciously as I did when I was a young woman, because once I had kids and a career, the demands on my time shut down so much of my reading time. I used to take three books on a one-week vacation and read them all! But I digress.

The canon is already inherently racist and sexist, so it’s no small wonder Plath was (is) left out of it. But also—I posit in Loving Sylvia Plath that Plath was left out of the canon because she was being punished by those who gatekeep the canon. Kate Manne theorizes in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny that women who step outside of the established norms of feminine-coded behavior are punished for doing so. She includes in that category publicly successful women, who are seen as taking “moral goods” (i.e. fame, public approval) from men, their rightful owners, and must therefore be taken down a peg. Finally, women who are seen as abandoning caretaking duties are also punished. 

The thing is, Plath fits those categories like a glove. She is understood as not only abandoning her maternal and wifely duties by killing herself—she is also seen as taking the fame and attention Hughes deserved away from him. And young women who flocked to her are seen as giving their care and attention to a dead woman, rather than the literary men who deserve it. And for all of these reasons, and more, the literary establishment begins a campaign to discredit Plath and her fans. You still see evidence of this today. (If you’re interested in this, check out this review in the New York Review of Books by Terry Castle…).

I know the most, of course, about Plath’s exclusion from the canon. But different versions of this have happened to so many women writers. Think of the “recovery” work that Alice Waters did to bring Zora Neale Hurston back to us. And I recently interviewed Iris Jamahl Dunkle about her new biography of Sanora Babb, the writer whose notes about Dust Bowl migrants were stolen by John Steinbeck, which pre-empted the publication of Babb’s own Dust Bowl novel, Whose Names Are Unknown. (It wasn’t published until 2004.) This is an old story! But it keeps getting repeated.

What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved?  (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format? )

I don’t read a lot of books that could be characterized as strictly historical, but I do read a ton of nonfiction by women. This past fall, I reread Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class, which contains many concise histories of the American women’s movements of the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, and of the history of forced sterilization, and was newly astonished by Davis’s abilities as a historical writer, how she is able to radically reframe a history so established as to be nearly stale. I also read Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings for the first time, and it has been an invaluable tool this spring, teaching introductory courses in Women and Gender Studies, helping students to rethink the history of slavery, which has often been whitewashed for them. Finally, I remain obsessed and somewhat eluded by Saidiya Hartman’s work, her “critical fabulations,” which I used to help frame chapter 8 of Loving Sylvia Plath. I think Hartman is the great thinker of our age. I chase after her, gratefully, just like I do Plath.

Do you think Women’s History Month is important and why?

I do, although to be entirely honest, I barely notice it, because it’s how I live all of the time, noticing and naming and honoring the realities of women’s lives. It’s how we all should, especially in a political time like the one we live in, today. If we honored women’s lives all of the time, we would be more likely to refuse things like the destruction and erasure of trans women’s lives, the wholesale murder of Palestinian women and children, and the murder of women seeking reproductive healthcare throughout America. To name just a few. May we do better, and soon. Our lives depend on it.

A question from Emily: Is there a writer you love and reconsider perpetually, in the way I do Sylvia Plath? If so, who? And why?
 
This is a hard one for me to answer because I am a perpetual re-reader, in many ways for many reasons.

There are books I turn to for comfort in times of stress. (Lots of comfort re-reading these days.) There are books, or in some cases chapters, that I turn to in response to certain seasons: The Secret Garden when the crocuses begin to appear (I just pulled it off the shelf), the fireworks scene in Eight Cousins on the Fourth of July, The Haunted Bookshop at Thanksgiving, a entire series of books about Christmas and the Solstice in December. (This year my life was so out of control in November and December that I didn’t read any of them. It left me feeling unmoored.)

More often, though, something I see or read tugs a mental thread about something I’ve read in the past. I go to track it down. And then I am swept into the book as a whole.

Each one of these re-readings, even the fluffiest of comfort reads, opens up the book or the oeuvre of read books in my head, for me in new ways.

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Interested in learning more about Emily and her work?

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Read this interview on Literary Hub: A Painful, Urgent Reimagining: Emily van Duyne on Writing a New History of Sylvia Plath’s Last Years

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